Santiago and Valparaiso

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Once again I found myself on a sleepless overnight bus journey. This time it was an 11 hour trip from Pucon to Santiago. The bus arrived at around 7.30am and by the time I had found myself to the metro it was rush hour. The rush hour here made the Jubilee line morning rush look empty. Every train that came in was so full absolutely no one could get on. After sitting on the platform for an hour I finally managed to barge my way on, much to the horror of the short local people. I think my backpack caught quite a few of them in the head. I think I upset them so much that one of the bastards decided to steal my camera from my day pack. There were so many people on the train I couldn´t even see my bag in front of me yet alone detect someone going in it. Thank god I had uploaded all my photos to facebook so the only things I lost were my videos. Sadly it took me until the top of Cerro Santa Lucia to discover my camera had been taken. From the top of Cerro Santa Lucia you get amazing views out over the city, so naturally I went for my camera to take some photos. BANG, it had gone! So the rest of my first day was spent wondering around the city looking for a new camera. Everything was so expensive though and they only had the old models.

The Andes hostel where I was staying seemed really quiet, all apart from one big fat guy in my room. His snoring was so loud the whole dorm couldn´t sleep. It got so bad a Swiss couple grabbed their sleeping bags and headed for the roof to sleep outside up on the roof terrace. This man was infamous around the hostel as everyone who shared a room with him had demanded to move the very next day. He was definitely unique, and totally gross.

The next day I went to Parque Arauco, which is Santiago´s version of Blue Water. In fact it was like a home from home as they had top shop, levis, hugo boss, macdonalds, kfc, pizza hut, subway etc etc. But after 4 hours of visiting the same stores and asking lots of questions, questions no one knew the answers to mainly because they didn´t speak English, I didn´t buy anything. My solution was to ask Courtney to buy me a new camera in Boston and bring it down in a weeks time when she comes to hike Torres Del Paine with me. The only downside, no photos for a week and yet another pictureless blog, sorry guys.

The next day I took a short bus ride to Valparaiso to have a night out with Claire who I had met in Pucon. Valpo was beautiful, set on the steep hillsides above the coast all the houses were painted in different bright colours. The hills were so steep that they had cable cars to get you up and down them. The bad thing was there were lots of narrow streets and the houses resembled modern slums so it was a very dangerous place to be. I met an Aussie girl who had been mugged in broad daylight there. Our night out was totally crazy. Claire had hooked up with a French guy called Max so we had lots of fun taking the piss out of his accent, he could not pronounce the letter H to save his life. Anyway, at 9.30 we went to a Mexican restaurant come karaoke bar. The food and cocktails were good but the singing very dodgy and after a few drinks Claire and I treated them to the classic Barbie Girl song!! Whilst eating this drunken local guy comes over with the microphone and starts asking us questions. Whilst doing this the locals were taking pictures of us and one woman was even recording us all. Turns out this guy was somewhat of a local legend. He had won a reality tv show by capturing the heart of a woman and had gone on to have his own chat show and star in their west end, it was so bizare. After eating we hit a local bar where we consumed 9 litres of beer for a measly 5 quid. God I wish beer was that cheap at home. At around 1am we hit the club. Now this was not a club like back home. On the ground floor they had karaoke, on the second floor they had a mix of live bands and dj´s and the roof was like a chill out terrace over looking the harbour. We got through so many red bulls we were dancing until 6am when they kicked us out. Now drinks over here don´t go by the shot measurement back home. Its simply a case of fill the glass half way with vodka and hand you the can of red bull, so you can imagine how smashed we were. When we left the club this local guy was trying to get us to go in his car to an after party. Being drunk we entertained him for 20 minutes with bad british sarcasm and then left to get a burger. We then proceeded to get lost on the way home before finally rolling in the door at 7am. Needless to say Sunday was a total write off.

Monday I headed back to Santiago where I spent all Monday night in Santiago airport with Skye and Tammie. I was so tired Tuesday morning the guy on the airport transfer bus had to wake me up to kick me off. In a sleep deprived state I booked a bus ticket to Talca because I remembered reading there was a nice national park there. 4 hours later I was being woken up again and kicked off the bus. Talca was a shit hole. It had no street signs and after getting lost for 30 minutes and having local people shout at me I gave up and got a bus back to Santiago. It turns out the national park was a further 2 hours away and getting there was a complete nightmare. So it´s a good job I didn´t stay.

Back in Santiago I checked back inot the Andes hostel as it is so well located, you literally roll off the metro into the front door. The next 3 days I spent chilling out in the city. The temperature was well into the 30´s so doing anything at all was hard work. But I did manage the 5km trek up Cerro San Cristobel where the views were stunning. However being totally soaked and dripping with sweat somewhat put a downer on it. I decided to take the cable car back down!! I met some really cool people in my hostel this time and spent most nights chilling out with them drinking beer on the roof. I was horrified to hear how generous the benefit system is in Austria, anyone in unemployment should move there now!! A guy called James from California had just got to Santiago for a 6 week stay to study business and spanish. On Friday he moved into an apartment so I went with him and a guy called Chris to help him move and then chill out at his friends apartment. They had a roof terrace with a swimming pool 23 stories up, it was so cool chilling out up there with a beer, the views were incredible. The bad thing was I had to sprint back across town to collect my washing before it closed otherwise I would be heading to Torres Del Paine with one set of clothes. Back in my hostel I had decided to have an early night as I was meeting Courtney early the next morning to catch our flights. Cue the Aussie couple who managed to persude me to have a beer over a game of pool. This then turned into hunting down an electric music festival, which turned out to be shit, so we hit a bar until 2 am. We then drank beer and played pool in the hostel until 4.30am, not good when I had to be up at 7am. So as you can imagine, severe lack of sleep, total hang over, but feeling totally up for Torres Del Paine. It turned out to be the most stunning week of my life. Will fill you in on it soon, but check out the pictures on facebook, it was so beautiful!!!

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